Benji Spends the Whole Summer Trying to Be Ben
The thing Benji decides at the start of the summer is that he is going to be Ben now. Not Benji. Benji is the kid name, the little brother name, the name that comes with being half of a matched set with Reggie. Ben is supposed to be the version of him that girls notice and friends respect. And what gets me about the book is that the name basically never sticks. He announces it and then spends three hundred pages still being Benji, still mumbling, still hanging back. Whitehead is pretty honest that reinvention is a thing you declare way more than a thing you actually pull off. The summer is not Benji becoming Ben. It is Benji finding out how slow that actually goes.
Part of why it does not stick is that he was never one person to begin with. He says he and Reggie "had recently ceased to be twins. We were born ten months apart and until I went to high school we came as a matched set, more Siamese than fraternal or identical, defined by an uncanny inseparability" (Whitehead 6). So before he can be Ben he has to come unstuck from Reggie first, and that is its own loss, not just a quick upgrade. The other problem is that he already knows how people see him and he kind of helps them do it. He admits that "I came over time to believe that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say, I tended to mumble or talk fast in an attempt to help people more easily ignore me" (Whitehead 237). You cannot just rename yourself out of a habit like that. The mumble is the thing actually running the problem here, not the name.
What I think the book ends on is that growing up is not a switch you flip at the start of summer. Benji wants the new identity to arrive all at once, already done, and instead he gets a summer of small embarrassing in-between moments. By the end he has changed, but not into the person he announced in June. He changed in the way people actually change, which is slow and a little messy and mostly without noticing. Benji had a whole plan to be Ben by the end of summer, but the kid who ended up showing up in September was just a slightly different Benji.
Hello! I think Benji's impossible change to Ben is really entertaining as well. However, I do think it is interesting that the true narrator, Ben from the future, was able to secure the new name. It makes me wonder how long it took for that transition to happen. And how many slow awkward moments Benji needed to endure.
ReplyDeleteHi. I think that Benji's reinvention being a futile quest is an interesting topic. In fact, we never refer to Benji as Ben. Never have us as a class really acknowledged or accepted that Benji is Ben. Only that at some abstract point in the future, Benji becomes Ben.
ReplyDeleteHey, I think this is quite true as when people try growing up they rebrand themselves, but interestingly enough Benji wasn't successful with his rebrand. Maybe this is a way to show that you can still develop as a person without changing your initial identity. Well done!
ReplyDeleteHi Lynn, I do think Benji now wnating to go as Ben is a coming-of age itself. Because its kind of like letting go of your childhood and showing that you have grown up and throughout the book we got to see Benji growing up and becoming to what he thinks is Ben but really your childhood is what shapes you and something that you can't let go of. Great post!
ReplyDeleteHi Lynn, I definitely agree that the summer is meant to teach him a lesson about how growing up doesn't happen spontaneously. I thought it was funny how at the end of the book, Benji was already planning his personal growth for the next year even though that's obviously not how it works. I also agree that seperating himself from Reggie is more of a gradual process, and not something he can just do. Great blog!
ReplyDeleteHi Lynn! I really like the way you articulate the difference between the person Benji wanted himself to become and the person he grew into. Growth and change can be aspirational, but there is only so much you can control. In fact, I wonder if older Benji (narrating) cringes at his younger attempts to reinvent himself. Great post!
ReplyDeleteBen's depiction of naming conventions in the Sag Harbor community suggests that it's not so easy to change one's name or nickname: N.P. is apparently stuck with his nickname, which has been apparently implicitly sanctioned by his own mother; and we're told about how "Little Bobby" becomes "Big Bobby" once a new Bobby comes up in the ranks. There's even a "Little Clive" now!
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the novel, when Benji is assessing his mixed results after trying to have a transformative summer, we might see his more realistic "plan" for the school year as some reflection of his maturity. Even as he sketches his ambitions to kiss a certain number of girls each semester, we see him revising down his goals to somewhat more realistic levels. We know that at some point this guy DOES become "Ben"--the narrator introduces himself with "My name is Ben," full stop. But at the end of the novel, he's still Benji--only now he's going to be Benji in combat boots, which just might lead him on the path to becoming Ben.
I like your assessment of the realism of Benji's development. Benji is still kind of stuck in stasis: nothing changes about his home life, although he becomes more disillusioned with his father. He is still trying to modify himself to be more popular, while shirking the responsibility that he should be learning from the older generation (we see this when Benji and his friends leave Barry David to his pyromanic devices to go drink beer). However, Benji does meet Melanie, who calls him Ben, and who trusts him enough to jump out a window and fall on him, but she ultimately doesn't form a lasting connection to him. I guess how we see the whole Melanie thing depends on whether or not we think she is "real."
ReplyDeleteHi Lynn!! I really enjoyed your blog post. I feel like Benji does try to become Ben, but it doesn't really stick because people find it hard to think of someone that they've known for a while that way. I really find the point that you made interesting, that the reason Ben didn't stick was that it's because he hasn't fully been able to separate himself from Reggie. Good Job!!!
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